As the year anniversary of Hurricane Ida has now come and passed, stories continue to flow in describing insurance providers failing to timely and completely evaluate the losses of policyholders...
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Capitelli & Wicker
On November 6, Louisiana voters will have the opportunity to eradicate a troubling vestige of the Jim Crow era: the non-unanimous felony verdict. Even though the drafters of the law...
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- La. Sec'y of State, Statement of Proposed Constitutional Amendments: November 6, 2018, https://www.sos.la.gov/ElectionsAndVoting/PublishedDocuments/ProposedConstitutionalAmendments2018Summaries.pdf (last accessed Oct. 23, 2018).
- [La. Const. Ann. art. I, § 17; La. Code Crim. P. art. 782(A).
- Id.
- Fed. R. Crim. P. 31(a).
- Or. Const. art. I, § 11; Or. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 136.450; see also State v. Lomax, 406 P.3d 94, 99 (Or. Ct. App. 2017).
- See, e.g., State v. Mack, 12-0625 (La. App. 4 Cir. 5/6/15); 162 So.3d 1284, 1288, writ denied, 15-1119 (La. 5/13/16); 191 So.3d 1054.
- Jeff Adelson, Gordon Russell, and John Simerman,
The split-jury rule was introduced in the Louisiana Constitution of 1898 as “part of a raft of deliberately discriminatory measures” fueled by the racial animosity of the Reconstruction era.7State v. Hankton, 12-0375 (La. App. 4 Cir. 8/2/13); 122 So.3d 1028, 1033, writ denied, 13-2109 (La. 3/14/14), 134 So.3d 1193.
- Id. at 1034.
- Official Journal of the Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of La. ("Official Journal") at 374-75 (Feb. 8, 1898), Judge Semmes was followed by Judge Ernest Kruttschnitt, President of the Convention, who openly scorned the equality demanded by the Reconstruction Amendments:
We have not drafted the exact Constitution that we should like to have drafted; otherwise we should have inscribed in it, if I know the popular sentiment of this State, universal white manhood suffrage, and the exclusion from the suffrage of every man with a trace of African blood in his veins. We could not do that on account of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and, therefore, we did … what has been referred to approvingly by the Supreme Court of the United States, in the late case of [Williams v. State of Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213, 222 (1898)] as … “swee[ping] the field of expedients,” but they were permissible expedients, and that is what we have done in order to keep the negro from exercising the suffrage. What care I whether the test we have put be a new one or old one? What care I whether it be more or less ridiculous or not? Doesn’t it meet the case? Doesn’t it let the white man, and doesn’t it stop the negro from voting, and isn’t that what we came here for?10Id. at 380.
